CNN - Conjecture, Not News

From CNN.com -

"Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777 on the way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, simply vanished from the sky on March 8. In the two weeks since, the mystery of what happened to its 227 passengers and 12 crew members has set off a frenzy of speculation and conspiracy theory hatching..."

FROM CNN!!!

I am by no means am a resource when it comes to mass media criticism.  I don't have cable nor even terrestrial TV in my home. I stream everything and read different blogs and websites to get my news.  As a kid, I used to think having 24-hour news channels was such a cool thing.  If you want to watch the news and know what's going on, just turn it on the TV and get what you need to know within 30 minutes.  I couldn't get that with my major 3 networks. I had to wait until 5, 6 or 10 PM CT to get my news

As our society has become more and more demanding of immediacy, news channels have had to turn to different tactics to keep viewership levels up and keep people interested in coming back.  One of those is to make the mundane seem exciting regardless of the consequences.  That's exactly what CNN has done with this plane that has gone missing on the other side of the world.

CNN has done non-stop coverage of the event.  If I were in the news reporting business, this is an incredibly sexy news story; by sexy, I mean perfect - tragedy, death, destruction, human emotion, technological failure, mayhem - everything a sycophant news agency would want to report on.  I am not saying that I get off on stories like these; I am merely stating that news people do because its what the entire American news reporting infrastructure is based on.  I'm not knocking CNN for taking the story because if I were them, I would cover it.  However, I am knocking them for reporting on it for 14 days straight...

...because beyond effectively Day 2, there's nothing new to report.

Nothing.

Here's what we haven't known since Day 2:

• Where the plane is.
• Why the plan disappeared.
• Whether or not the plane crashed.
• If if did crash, where the flight recorders are.
• If it didn't crash, where the plane landed.
• Who was involve din the disappearance.
• Whether or not government agencies involved in the search and rescue operations are sharing everything they know.  
• Whether or not the information being gathered is accurate.

If you look at that short list of things we don't know, you would think, "Wow. There's a lot we don't know.  Let's wait to see if they find something and then report it."  Nope. Not CNN.  They've been doing the following ad naseum, 24X7:

• Covering this story while disregarding more recent, fact-filled news such as the crisis in Crimea, earthquakes hitting California, North Korean missile launches, etc.
• Bringing on "experts" in related fields to give their opinions on what could've, should've, would've happened given an arbitrary list of scenarios.  They basically sit on a panel to guess and speculate what could have happened.
• Until recently, they were labeling everything as "breaking news".  I think they've started seeing enough negative reaction that today they dropped that moniker.  They still report on the place like they doing previously but now they're no longer calling it "breaking news" (it's kinda hard to call it breaking news after let's say Day 3 or 4 when they have nothing new to report).
• Acting as if any and every piece of news is important enough to spend hours rehashing the same information .  Recently they found unidentified objects floating in the water from satellite imagery that are large enough to maybe be parts of the plane.  What they don't stress very often is the fact that the imagery is at least 2-4 days old which means the information is no longer accurate.  It's automatically asking for conjecture to be made to be acted upon.  However, CNN reports on it as if they are close to cracking the case wide open.
• Asking a lot of rhetorical questions such as "How is it possible something so big can just....disappear?!" or "With all of the technology we have where we can send men to the moon and guide drones remotely, why is the technology on the plane so antiquated?" 

Why is CNN, which I thought was supposed to be a news network, spending an extraordinary amount of time on this?  It's not that the story doesn't deserve any time but based on my won non-scientific, anecdotal watching of the channel, they spend roughly 30-45 seconds out of every hour on a different news story but then immediately jump back to some bullsh*t plane-related story where the would've/should've/could'ves return.   What is the endgame here with CNN doing this?

I realize that all of the 24X7 American news channels are doing the same but CNN seems to be the worst.  By being so flagrant with their shoddy reporting, they've diminished any real credibility as a news organization.  They're basically the TMZ of news porn.  I don't go to TMZ to get news that matters about celebrities.  I go there to be entertained and that is exactly what CNN is doing.  Why?!!

I feel trapped now.  What am I supposed to watch and where am I supposed to get my news?  Should I just stop watching American news all together?  Are the alternatives much better?  If you've got some help in that arena, please comment below and let me know.

How To Be Remembered On and Off Stage

I was sitting at Second City today and couldn't help but to eavesdrop on this group of young guys talking about their upcoming show today (It wasn't too hard to catch the conversation - they were speaking pretty fawkin' loudly).  One was pretty miffed about the way he got cast in the show (number of lines, type of roles he got, stage time, etc.) and wouldn't let it go.  His friend was doing his best to console him but in my opinion almost making the situation worse.  I spent 10 minutes fighting myself on making a comment on their conversation because I didn't want to come off as a know-it-all or as unsympathetic.  Finally, I mustered up the courage to put his situation in perspective.

I walked over to them and said softly, "Guys..."

Their faces froze like they just got in trouble.  Great.  Now I REALLY feel like a old man.

I said, "I couldn't help but overhear your situation and wondered if you would like to get some perspective from an 'old man' in this game."  Surprisingly, the perked up and invited me to have a seat.  I grabbed a seat and immediately went into a lecturing posture.  Cot damn I feel old.

"Dude, I've been in this game for close to 11 years and I have been put into your situation countless times," I assured him. "I know how you feel because I have felt that way many times before.  You're an actor.  You've been put in bit parts before. "  I stopped and looked at him closely.  "How old are you?"

"22," he responded.

I had to catch myself from scoffing at him when he responded.  22?!  C'mon.  It only reaffirmed what I was about to say to him.

"Alright, 22.  You're young, " I said.  "This won't be the last show you're ever going to do, right?  You're gonna keep doing shows and being involved with other people and at some point, you're going to forget that this ever happened.  You won't give two shits about it.  You'll look back when you're on the main stage in three years thinking 'Why was I trippin' over that?  Fuck those guys."  They both laughed out loud.  That was comforting. I wasn't sure if I was being condescending in my approach or not.   I felt like Edward James Olmos - "I'm getting through to deez keedz!"

"The thing to remember, " I continued, "is that people are not going to remember much of anything from this show.  They're not going to remember the dialog.  they are necessarily going to remember each member of the cast.  The thing they are going to remember is how supportive you were in delivering those parts in the best way possible.  Your friend here is right.  You could not have much of anything as far as lines are but you can get the biggest laugh in a scene by delivering that one line in such a way that the audience feels it.  You can rock an entire scene by just committing your heart and soul to that bit part.  People won't remember the tons of dialogue by those other cats, but instead they'll say 'Hey - remember that one guy who came out did that one funny line or thing?  I hope he does that again' and they'll continue to look for you as the show goes on.

Let me tell you a story from my own experience.  I was in a Level 3 show where we did a set of improv.  At the very end of the show, we did a set of musical improv - singprov.  So, I'm in this scene with this guy and the suggestion was 'gingerbread' man.  So, I come out looking like gingerbread man.  I started singing and then my castmate decided to rip my arm off.  I then continue singing as he rips off my other arm.  He then proceeds to rip off my head.  As he did that, I started falling to the floor and right as that happened, the lights went out.  The crowd loved it.  After the show, I never got so many compliments - about how well I fell to the floor at that moment.  Nevermind the 20 minutes of good improv I just did.  My entire acting ability was encapsulated in that 1 second fall I took.  My point is, you can't decide what an audience is going to remember or think about you.  You have to rock every moment you're on stage and hope that some of it sticks when they leave. 

You don't want to be that guy that is always asking for lines and parts.  Don't get me wrong.  You do have the right to question the casting but take it up with your director.  If after your director has made a decision you still get cast in the manner you were before, accept it.  Rock the parts you were given.  The thing people will remember always is how professional you were in accepting your role for a given production.   Take it with grace.  Support your team even if they necessarily reciprocate it at the same level you feel is warranted, because you after that production is done, you'll move onto bigger and better things. 

Now you can decide whether or not to be like me about the situation.  I sometimes tend to be vindictive about these situations and rock those parts to get back at those guys 'Fine. Don't cast me in the parts I feel I deserve?  Well, I'll show you all!'  Or, you can be much more mature about it and take it with grace and realize that this will pass.  I recommend the latter.  You'll be fine.  You look like you know what you want to do.  I know you'll rawk this shit.  Ignore them fools and do the best you can with what you got.  Just know, you're not the only one this type of stuff happens to."

After that diatribe, he let out a big sigh and asked me my name.  I gave it to him and while extending his hand for a handshake said, "Thanks Nelson. I really needed to hear that, man.  I feel a lot better knowing that and gave me a lot to think about."  I shook his hand and felt so good about helping him.

His group finally gathered to go into a classroom so I just iterated some of the key phrases above for him to take with him.  He had a huge smile on his face as he headed off downstairs to the dungeon of institutionalized learning.

Now, this type of sharing I can do all day.

Searching For Fullfilness Within

I had dinner tonight with a friend of mine who I admire and respect.  He's on my shortlist of people I wish I could perform as well as when on stage.  For everything going so well for the both of us, we both have our own respective follies and insecurities to contend with.  I feel we're sort of kindred spirits in that vein.

The thing that I realized I look for is outside validation instead of going within to get it.  It stems from issues I have with never really getting what I wanted from my father.  I wanted to always be loved and accepted as I was by him, but never felt I really got that from him.  so, a lot of my initial motivations are to get to the point people will love me and accept me.  For example, I went through a long week of "creative withdrawl" after my run with Specter of Treason finished.  I took two days off from myself to recover and then on the third day, I felt the familiar twinge of being creative beckon.  Then by the following weekend, I was fighting myself from trying to get into another production.  The motivation behind getting into another production was not because I felt creative unsatisfied but rather because I knew I was doing it to get people's attention and adoration.  So, I basically called myself out a number of times on social media to sort of shame myself into doing the opposite (not the best way to do so but it worked).

My friend is gong through the same thing in his life as well but his need for love and acceptance differ from mine in motivation and result.  The similarities in our situations was so strong that I gave him my "worldly" answer for dealing with his problems:

• Find Your Passion(s)
  As I've gotten older, I've really started analyzing what it is I want to do with my life and what I wish to spend my limited energy on.  I realized that only those things that I am passionate about are worth pursuing head on.  How do you know you're passionate about something? You're willing to kill, maim, and destroy anything in your path to obtain your goal ;-)  That's how much the desire must burn to achieve the  desired outcome.  Do this first and as soon as possible.  It will frame the next  item.
   
• Pursue Your Passion Incrementally
  A great day consists of a series of great moments.  Don't get caught up in planning the path of the outcome necessarily ("the how") but rater focus on the goal ("the what").  Break your pursuit of a given goal into smaller goals and focus on each on o f those goals from the onset.  Don't worry about how you're going to achieve each goal but rather the journey to get there.  This is incredibly hard to do even for me.  I get caught up in the drama of the pursuit of happiness a lot.  I'm working on going back to not planning a darn thing and allowing things to "just happen" again.  I was a lot happier and cherished each moment much more.

After our chat tonight, I know we both feel a tiny bit better about our futures.  Gotta keep working on these concepts and reinforcing them until they're second nature.

Believing What You're Told - Now & Then

As part of the cast of the Specter of Treason - An Oswald Trial performance, I've been asked to talk about the show on Vocolo.org 89.5 FM this Friday.  To add to the honor of just speaking about this show, I inevitably will get asked about the John F. Kennedy (JFK) assassination itself and how it relates to this show.  So, I've begun doing research on the JFK assassination and along the way came to an interesting observation.

The JFK assassination, which happened 50 years ago, has been controversial since that horrible day November 22nd, 1963.  I was born in 1976 and didn't get interested in studying the JFK assassination until 1991.  Until '91, I believed it was Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) who acted alone in committing this crime as that's what all of my textbooks at the time read.  After seeing Oliver Stone's film JFK, I began to question the validity of what I had been taught.  I ended reading a ton of books at the time that explored different aspects of the crime - the botched autopsy, mafia connections, Cuban reprisal from the Bay of Pigs debacle, CIA's interest in Vietnam and Cuba, the FBIs involvement in in ballistic testing of the Warren Commission's "magic bullet theory", etc.  It was fascinating web of theories that stimulated my mind into trying to figure out all by myself as a high school sophomore :)  I was much more apprehensive to believe to government whenever they told me anything as the "truth".



Fast forward to 2001. 9/11 happened.  After seeing those two buildings falls, I truly believe what I was told from that day - two planes full of jet fuel were hijacked by terrorists and slammed into the tallest WTC buildings which in turned caused them to collapse.  Everything that contradicts this explanation in my opinion only strengthen what I believe I saw happen that terrible day.  Here's an example of one of the mos popular "truther" documentaries on 9/11:


I am not naive enough to believe everything the Government tells me but at the same time, when it comes to proving something contradictory, there has to be some more proof of the alternate theory presented .  For some reason, for the JFK assassination does that for me.  There's enough evidence there for me to say "What I was told was not the truth."  However, for 9/11, there isn't.  Why?  Could it be because I experienced 9/11 myself and have not had the distance away from what happened to consider evidence outside my recollections?  Am I just holding onto what I was told because it's more convenient for me to believe such a simple explanation vs. more sinister complicated plots?  Am I too tied to my experience vs. the facts?  I don't know.

As I learn more about the JFK assassination, I will continue reviewing my own attachment to my own biases.

An American Weiner Roast

Watching Anthony Weiner (AW) continuing to be sucked down (no pun intended) the blackhole of double entendre drenched comedy got me thinking.  Why is this such a big deal?  I'll tell you.

If you're ever a player in the public arena, you must play by our American social rules.

Image Is Everything
You're probably wondering how my assertion above has anything to do with a politician showing his frankfurter on the Internet and getting caught twice.  I believe that we as Americans LOVE to build an image up for people in the public eye and want to retain ownership over that image ad infinitum.  We make them out to be good people, bad parents, cheaters, humanitarians, drug addicts, or entrepreneurs.  We spend a lot of time on this image and it's a collective art and skill.  As long as they keep playing along with whatever society tells them to do, act, say, or think, everyone's happy.

After being caught the first time, homeboy decided to take a leave of absence from Congress (then eventually resigned) and attend counseling for his problem.  He accepted the image of "Something is wrong with you. We're telling you to go away for a while and work on this problem.  Once you've 'repented' enough (or we've forgetten about you), come back and we'll see what we can do."  At that point, he became a broken man with immoral thoughts and mild psychological problems to us and he was banished to Neverland only to return once he grew up.

Deviancy Both Online and Off-Line

When AW decided to run for New York's mayor roughly only 2 years after his fall from grace, he caught the public off-guard.  Did he come back too early?  Did he truly change in the time he went away?  Was he a "better man"?  Would he fit the unspoken, undefined, arbitrary metric we'd set for him?  We were poised to find out.

He had raised a lot of money to run for mayor and had actually ran once in 2005 (but dropped out) so he had some legitimacy in showing NYC he wanted the job even before his scandal broke.  Poll after poll showed that many people felt he shouldn't even run considering what had happened to him in Congress.  Apparently two years wasn't enough time for us to forget.  However, he was able to become a real contender by acknowledging his faults in a very direct manner and sharing some real ideas for changing things in NYC [Editor's note: I don't live in NYC so I don't know if his ideas are good or bad.  I just know he's coming up with actual plans and describing their implementations versus giving us a lot of rhetoric and nebulous ideas regarding change.].  American's love a comeback story.  He was giving it to us by defying the odds and winning people, and by doing so, playing to our social rules.

Then he decided to change the cot damn story - without consulting with us!

Weinergate Teil Zwei
AW recently admitted to continuing his sexting ways publicly after more Weiner pictures surfaced for up to a year after he left Congress. He gave the comedy world a second "gift that kept on giving" by adding the new dimension of his online alter ego of "Carlos Danger".  He stepped up his efforts to be smacked down mightily by the general public and succeeded.  The adage of "Fool me once, shame you. Fool me twice, shame on me" comes into play ESPECIALLY after he was doing so well to win us back.  Everyone's asking him to again step down from his ambitions and go away.  There's no way he's going to survive this damage to his reputation and campaign.

Or will he...?

AW has refused to drop out of the mayoral race with a defiance that is magical.

Get Your Game Up!

For all intents and purposes, AW knows how he messed up twice and that there's a good chance this campaign was an overall personal and political disaster; however, he presses on in the mere hopes that people will realize sexting ability doesn't directly equate to legislating ability inversely (but if in contrast it equated proportionally, COT DAMN that would be awesome!).  He's not taking his eyes off his prize of a position of power no matter who or what tries to thwart him even if it's himself.

What I think people find most offensive about this situation is that AW basically has shown twice that  he has no real "game" to speak of.  By "game", I'm saying that AW should've never been caught in the first place let alone twice.  What subconsciously offends us is that he got caught twice and so easily.  It was relatively known that John F. Kennedy was a womanizer but yet he's still considered one of the best Presidents ever.  Why?  Because he had game both personally and with the press to keep his extra-marital activities on the hush.  In today's media landscape, it's almost impossible to have the relationship with the press in order to keep things quiet.  When AW outed himself so easily the first time, we lost respect for him.  He was just starting to get it back with us until *bam* he showed that he STILL had no game!

The pressing debate is not whether or not sexually-motivated activity would make him unfit to legislate but rather does his inability to keep his behavior under wraps enough to not shatter the images we make for him moving forward?  Does he have enough game to live up to a "clean" image while satisfying his needs?  If so, Americans can respect that, thus, would be willing to suspend their disbelief and go along with the determining if he's good enough to be mayor.  But if he can't, there's no reason for him to continue.

I'd like to see AW win this and defy everything.  If he wins, I'll send him a picture of myself: